


Vis Insita

by isellys



Series: Magic, the Digital Age, and Sicknasty Kids [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Past Character Death, Roxy's love affair with science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-26
Updated: 2016-03-26
Packaged: 2018-05-29 05:34:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6361483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isellys/pseuds/isellys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The International Statute of Secrecy is repealed; Roxy loses one world and gains another; Dirk takes haunted steps. The players of a changing world take their places.</p><p>And, years later,—stop me if you've heard this one before—a physicist and a wizard walk into a bar.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vis Insita

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I haven't been actively following Homestuck for a _long_ time; this is up because it was a near-finished WIP which I abandoned when school began to kick my ass, and I liked the premise too much to leave it unfinished. All characters here are based on how they were at the beginning of Act 6.

_Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line_  
_unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon._

* * *

 

She had been the one who wanted to meet there. Dirk had been alarmed at first, but she comes in an hour after he does and orders a glass of orange juice from the bartender. Dirk is in the middle of finishing a glass of cheap whiskey. When he notices the way she eyes the glass in his hand, he gulps it all down and puts the glass as far away as possible.

“You can trust me,” she says, sounding hurt.

He smiles dryly. “You know me; I’ve got ninety-nine problems but trusting ain’t one.”

Roxy doesn’t even bother to reply to that. When the bartender gives him a glass of water and he does his habitual poison check on it, she doesn’t even blink, just keeps chattering about her work. Sollux’s name finds its way into her narrative plenty—at this point in their lives Sollux isn’t a new addition to Roxy’s projects anymore, but it throws Dirk off every time she mentions him. Roxy treats his sudden appearance as something of a miracle (“He was gone for like, a decade! More, even. Can you imagine, just running into him one day like I did? Holy shit bananas. Some peeps would call it fate,” she’d said.) Dirk knows better.

An interconnected global network, that’s what they’re working on, forever held up by the power of magic: a literal web of spells stretching from pole to freezing pole, even over oceans, floating beyond the clouds. A sky-wide cloud of information. It’s a massive, ambitious undertaking, not to mention insanely expensive. Roxy’s been dizzy about it a few times before, but her eyes still shine when she mentions it. Besides, she adds, she took some amazeballs pictures during the trip to Siberia. Her Instagram followers had doubled in three days. Then she pauses, watches him sip his drink.

“He doesn’t look like someone who’d try to poison you,” she murmurs, glancing at the bartender, who is a stout man with dimples and large, friendly eyes.

Dirk’s eyes are behind his glasses—she can’t possibly see them—but he stares at her flatly anyway. “In my line of work, it’s people like you who get killed off faster than you can say ‘bukkake’.”

“Well,” she chirps, “good job my occupation’s completely legal, then.”

Someone who knows his sister less well than he does would not catch the disapproval in her voice. Not that that would be their fault. She used to be more forward about it; _why don’t you come work with me, Dirky_ , or _do you ever question what you do for that dough?_ None of it had ever affected him, so she had switched tactics. Roxy is, beyond any doubt, her mother’s daughter.

It was only two months ago that she had invited him to dinner with Terezi. Dirk is thankfully blessed with more common sense than curiosity, so he had declined. Just bring yourself, Roxy had advised; you don’t have to take Timaeus along, she’d said. Dirk had looked away. Otherwise he’d have to tell her that she didn’t understand what it was really like, and he wasn’t the one who was going to put that thought in her mind, that look on her face.

“Since I’m holiday right now, you can treat me like you’d treat someone who isn’t a criminal,” he says now, shrugging.

Roxy downs her juice and grins at him. “I never treat you like a criminal. I always treat you like my brother, and my brother is this strange bloke who likes horse dolls and all that. Also, he likes to overpack. What did you bring?”

“Clothes,” he says, glancing at his bag. “Canned food. A lot of water. Petrol for your car. A sleeping bag.”

“Great, you’re learning. We don’t need the canned food, let’s just give it to a hobo on the way.”

Roxy pays (“I don’t like using your money, Dirk,” she’d told him, “I never know where the hell it might’ve come from,”) and they walk outside, at the same pace, to Roxy’s car. It’s a vintage pink sedan with leather seats Roxy likes to jump and down on. Inside, it always smells a little like her perfume, a sweet sugary scent with a touch of smoke, which she orders from some obscure website in large boxes.

“Where to, Your Majesty?” Roxy asks him, fingers drumming on the steering wheel. Her profile is stark against the gray of the morning; the silver streaks in her hair become distinguishable from the still-blond parts up close.

He glances up at the sky. Through his lenses, it looks almost morose.

In the end it’s always Roxy who decides, anyway. “Let’s just drive,” he says, “and stop whenever.”

She salutes him with a thin, now-wrinkled hand.

“Roger that, cap’n,” she says. Dirk turns on the radio, which is connected to Roxy’s next-generation phone. He fumbles with the touch screen but manages to select a song in the end.

 _You do all the thinking, where we—just digging shelters in the snow—build a house of dream and domino,_ sings the man, as Dirk watches buildings and windows go by, the road blurring beneath the wheels of her car, the silver clouds rising up in the horizon in lieu of smoke—nobody uses chimneys anymore. He turns and watches Roxy hum. When she notices that he’s looking her way, she stops.

“Hey, Dirk. Wanna hear a funny story?”

“Shoot, Rox,” he says. Her smile is the most infectious thing on Earth.

* * *

Two years after the battle that killed Dave and Rose, Roxy celebrates her twenty-fifth birthday, with a huge-ass cake Jane baked herself and a shitload of candles. The guest list isn’t long; most of their friends have fled the country, or never stayed in touch, or are no longer alive. And since Roxy and Dirk have inherited more money than they know how to spend, they’re providing everyone with enough alcohol to get an army of elephants wasted.

 _Think of all the actual useful things you could do with all that money, you fucknut. What, is your head just full of hair gel, or do you actually have something that half looks like a brain in there?_ says Karkat in Dirk’s mind and his throat constricts. The memory of rough fingertips pressed against his neck makes the air go thick in his lungs.

“Hey.” It’s Jane, with her hand on his shoulder and a worried look on her face. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, just feeling a little nostalgic. You know how it is, see some people laughing and get a blast from the past, start feeling the sepia ‘round the edges. Shit ain’t pleasant, but that’s how we have to live.”

The words tumble out a little too quickly. Dirk is still thinking of Karkat’s angry eyes and permanent frown.

“To absent friends,” he says, raising his glass. Jane clinks hers against it even though the look doesn’t leave her face. Dirk downs his drink; she takes a sip.

“Your sister was probably born in a keg. I’m saying this so you know you will probably need to carry her upstairs.” She’s got this faintly bewildered, purely Jane look on her face. Roxy stumbles with a shriek into a circle of wizards and tells them to ‘rock on like it’s a Y2K party’. He and Jane share a glance. In the corner, Jake is already down to his last article of clothing (a pair of briefs patterned with cartoon dragons) and they would probably have to step in pretty soon. “Stock up on aspirin, Dirk. One can never have enough aspirin.”

“Going Muggle, huh.”

“You know what they say. Once you go Muggle, you never go back.” Jane snorts. “Oh, that was awful, it doesn’t even rhyme.”

“Points for effort,” Dirk says.

The silence between them is companionable. Silence isn’t quite the right word for it—Terezi is belting out something awful about cherry bombs, and Nepeta and Jake are imitating a round of pro wrestling, sending things crashing to the floor at random—so mostly Dirk and Jane are just not talking, trying their best to stay calm and rational.

“I really think we need to get an adult here,” he observes.

Jane chuckles. “The fact that that’s a rather apt summary of this night should definitely be a cause for concern.”

“Oh, I’m concerned, all right,” he tells her flatly. “Trying to get drunk Jake to go to bed is like trying to teach a snake to fight with a katana, except snakes might actually fucking _listen_ to you.”

“All that aside, it really is nice, isn’t it, not anticipating any sort of danger. If I have to fight a hangover tomorrow, I can do so without thinking about having to fight off a sudden Death Eater attack. Even after all this time, I’m still not used to that, if you can believe it.”

“That’s not the only thing that takes getting used to. I still wake up expecting someone next to me in the morning.”

Sometimes he still pours two more cups than what’s necessary, and he doesn’t realize it until Roxy points it out with a bemused look. Karkat’s half of the closet is still filled up with his clothes; it smells like him, overlain by time and dust; each morning Dirk opens up the doors to breathe in the mist.

“You shouldn’t be dwelling on that, Dirk,” Jane says quietly, probably noticing the look on his face. “It’ll stop you from being happy, this habit of yours.”

He bites back the reply. There’s no need to turn even misery into a contest, even if Jane has no way of winning it. The chance to say anything about it disappears when Roxy kind of sways and collapses, and Dirk Apparates just to catch her. Jake is already dozing on a bench with Kanaya half on top of him, he notes with relief. He signals Jane to tidy up Jake’s clothes; he’ll want them tomorrow, even if he doesn’t feel like they’re necessary today.

Jane’s got an armful of Jake with her, and her glasses are skewed. She ducks into a dark street with a _good luck tidying all that up tomorrow, really,_ and then she’s off, all five-feet-something of politeness and common sense, leaving Dirk with his unconscious sister and something like a headache coming on.

By the next morning it’s gone. He takes a shower because he collapsed into his bed without even changing yesterday, and he feels fucking gross. Back when he was in Hogwarts he didn’t even give a shit. And then he graduated and got a boyfriend.

 _Merlin fucking dammit, can’t I just have a single day,_ he thinks, and is cut off by swearing from downstairs. Dirk blinks. Roxy shouldn’t even be halfway _functional_ right now.

“Any particular reason why you’re doing an impression of a thirteen-year-old boy at nine a.m.?”

“Decided to take drama classes. You know how it is, got to get into character.” Roxy fixes him a look worthy of Karkat. “ _No_ , you tit. I’m trying to clean up, but it isn’t working.”

“Yeah?” By the looks of it, Roxy hasn’t even started. All the furniture is still knocked over, and there are weird dried puddles everywhere. Jake’s shirt, he notices, is still on the floor. Roxy is smiling at him kind of guiltily, like _hey, caught me slacking,_ but he notices the white-knuckled grip she has around her wand. She lifts it up, waves it around, and nothing happens.

She tries a few incantations next. Nothing. “Ugh,” she says, “ _accio_ coffee,” and out flies a cloud of dark brown beans from one of the cabinets. Roxy looks somewhat pleased despite the fact that there are now coffee beans in her hair.

“Maybe you’re just hungover. I can do it, Rox, just go back to sleep.”

“Yeah, okay,” Roxy says, yawning, and goes upstairs.

Dirk takes in the sight before him. All the dead people in the world who were tidy in their lifetimes are probably rolling in their graves right now. The headache makes its slow, sneaky comeback, and he gets to work.

* * *

By the time the sun is high over the sky, albeit hidden behind thick, somber clouds, Dirk has completely lost track of where they are. There are blue, mist-shrouded mountains around them. Carpets of messy grayish grass covers the ground that stretches out infinitely sideways; the road is a bridge across a sea of dry strands; large stones dot the landscape, like islands of solidity. The smell of everything is crisp and rain-like, but colder—the smell of snowfall, even though snow hasn’t fallen, and wouldn’t fall, for a while. There are days when the sky is bright and light comes down like a fog descending. This is not one of those days.

Roxy kills the engine and steps out.

“Well!” she says. “I like this place.”

Then she walks to the back of the car and opens up the trunk, pulls something out. She shouts at him to help her out. Dirk gets out, helps her carry the nylon and a vinyl tarp. Roxy holds a bunch of long plastic and metal sticks in her hands. With them shaking beside her, she skips over across the area, finally stopping on some spot she deems suitable. It’s a bald patch on the grassy plain. When Dirk gets there she’s kicking rocks away with a thick-soled boot.

They set up the tent together. She connects the tent poles; he lays down the vinyl tarp. They push the poles into the tent itself, laughing as it fails to rise, and spend a good ten minutes trying to raise it up. When it does Roxy claps with the sort of excitement usually reserved for lively concerts and death-defying stunts. Finally, Roxy fetches two hammers and four stakes from her car and they pin the tent down, two stakes each.

He stands in front of its entrance and she ducks, dragging him inside with her. They stumble and fall in an idiotically giggling heap on the floor of the tent. He can still feel the uneven ground beneath the nylon; the space is so small that Dirk feels a little claustrophobic. Roxy sort of drapes herself over him and he feels warmer than he’s been in months. The easy limbs of youth, him and her and Jane and Jake, a tangle of teenagers on a wooden floor, laughing until breathing was difficult. He shuts his eyes, remembers the way Jake’s hair falls on his forehead, the neatly filed curves of Jane’s fingernails. The sound of Roxy’s voice when it was much lighter than this.

Now she says: “I’m gonna wake up sore all over tomorrow. Ugh. Being old _sucks_.”

“See? We should’ve brought my tent. It has a goddamn Jacuzzi. There’s a pantry, Rox. I could be cooking you spaghetti with pesto right now, because I’m such a great brother.”

She laughs dismissively.

“You’re too used to having it easy, Mr. Big Shot,” she says. Then she gets up and dusts herself off. “C’mon, let’s go for a walk.”

* * *

Roxy is twenty-six years and five months old when she finally loses her magic completely. It happens gradually. The first spells to go are her favorites: flames and light-bursts, bullets of heat, and Roxy is forced to rely on spells that throw shit around for dueling practice for about a year.

Next, transportation magic abandons her; broomsticks no longer fly on her command, and she can spin on the spot for minutes on end without a loud crack telling her that she has succeeded at moving. Portkeys and the Floo Network remain her only means of magical transportation. But then again, she had said bitterly, Muggles could use them too.

Then everything else disappears eventually. _Wingardium leviosa, expelliarmus, expecto patronum—_ such words cease to mean anything to her. Over the course of a few months Roxy’s patronus changes shape, from a sleek mountain cat, to kitten-shaped cloud, to a silvery wisp, and then to nothing at all.

He takes Roxy to St. Mungo’s when she tries to Apparate for so long that she crashes into a table and bangs her head. First they treat her concussion, then laugh and tell them it’s not something they need St. Mungo’s for. Then Dirk sits down and Roxy tells them her story.

“Well, we’ve never had anything like this before,” says one Healer, the way one might talk about an interesting mouth wart. “Let’s run a couple of tests, yes?”

Another tells them: “Oh, maybe just get more sleep. You can’t be serious about this.” Then he turns away, shaking his head, going _the things people will do for attention these days. I don’t get youngsters._

Dirk, to his credit, does not punch the Healer. Roxy does. It gets them escorted out.

She groans while they run outside. “They don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Roxy says mournfully. “I’m just gonna become a Squib, and there’s nothing any of us are gonna do about it. This is so depressing. I’m gonna live with seventy cats and creep all the neighbors out. Fuck. Let’s—why don’t we have a drink, yeah?”

Because Dirk doesn’t know any better, he takes her to a pub. Roxy drinks herself into a stupor, then passes out on the table, and Dirk carries her home. He tucks her into bed, telling her fondly that yeah, things are gonna be okay, you can get through this, Rox, hearing her murmur unconsciously in return.

A month later, she moves out. It surprises Dirk. The phantom shadows of Dave and Rose have always haunted him in this house, but he’d decided to stay because that’s the kind of person he was—he welcomes his ghosts, even when they weep at him. Roxy, on the other hand, gazes at the dumb orange painting of Dave with wings fondly and engages it in long, meandering conversations; she smiles when the morning light filters in just the way Rose had liked it; her hands move quickest when making tea the way their guardians had taken it. Her decision leaves him confused, but he doesn’t think much of it. Dirk doesn’t dwell on other people’s decisions unless the endeavor might prove profitable. She offers only a shrug by way of explanation, and then her trunks are gone, and she with them (in a cab; no broomsticks, no Floo).

It’s much later, when he visits her at her house, that he discovers the true reason for her departure. They’ve never met there, and technically Roxy hasn’t exactly agreed to this visit. But Dirk presses on because the itch in the back of his mind has become too much to ignore.

When he Apparates in from Knockturn Alley it’s dark save for some yellowing lamps in the corners of the living room. The place smells musty, unclean, and the floor is sticky like Roxy’s forgotten to mop it and sweep it for ages. He’s about to call out for her when he hears her voice.

She’s sobbing, breathing with great gulps, the despair thick in ever sound she makes. Dirk goes cold. The only other time he had ever heard anything like it was when they had left the castle only to watch a tower explode in green flames, and the light had illuminated Roxy’s tear-streaked face with cruel relish.

“Rox?”

He can’t see her. He can’t see anything. Dirk takes off his shades and is about to say _lumos_ when he hears her already saying it, over and over.

“ _Lumos. Lumos! Lumos, lumos, lumos,”_ Roxy chants amid wrecked sounds, as though uttering a prayer. “Just one _fucking_ time, _lumos!_ ”

When he reaches her side and pulls her into a hug, she starts crying hysterically, screaming into the cloth of his shirt. The pain that comes for him is a physical ache, deep and echoing, making him inhale shallow breaths. _The scales of the world are unbalanced from the get-go, chiquita_ , he’d told Terezi. It comes to bite him in the ass in the worst way possible.

“Hey,” he says. “I’m here for you. You’re gonna be fine, Rox.”

She hiccups. The air she breathes smells like alcohol.

“It’s what I have left of them,” she says, and Dirk just hugs her again, tighter this time. What else can he do, in the face of this? He waits there, until the sun rises and weak splashes of pale pastel allows him to see the terrible state of the room: smashed lamps, empty bottles, shredded blankets. Roxy is curled up, asleep in his arms, but for the first time she doesn’t look like there’s a shred of peace left in her.

* * *

First, she fetches a pouch from her bag, and then she leads Dirk in the direction of the mountain. The terrain remains unchanged even when they’ve walked far enough that Roxy’s car and their tent are both barely dots in the distance. Really, the sky is still gray and the landscape is uninspiring. Yet with Roxy walking next to him, her feet disturbing the wildflowers, Dirk is seized by a sudden urge to take a photo of the unsightly grass, the dry ground, and print it out, so that one day he might look at it and think: I was once happy here.

“You know, Rox, I’m still waiting for the day where you take me somewhere actually worth seeing,” he says.

“I took you to the lab once. You broke like, five burettes.”

That had not been Dirk’s fault.

“Tell your employees that it’s not a good idea to sneak up on someone who grew up during times when violent murder was a normal thing.”

“What, they do it to me all the time. It’s not _sneaking up_ , Dirk, it’s just called walking like you don’t have elephant feet. You’re just high-strung. It’s the job, it’s making you nuttier than a big bag o’ trail mix.”

This conversation won’t go anywhere, so he shoves her, and she shoves back, hard enough to tip him off-balance. His arms fly out in twin propellers, and when he steadies himself, she’s grinning at him so all her wrinkles deepen.

They’re thirteen, he swears, idiots with chocolate stains above their lips and crumbs on their hands, homework five weeks overdue, and detention in the dungeons on Friday.

“Super fucking funny, Rox,” he says, with a little bit of real anger, but he sits down anyway. “It’s complicated.”

“El-oh-el. I didn’t come here to watch you mope. Tell you what, I brought a present. Remember this?”

Roxy digs into the pouch. When she takes her hand out, there are a bunch of gleaming grey lumps in her hand. She sets them down on the grass. They’re like miniature versions of the boulders he’d seen around them. Turning them over in his hands, he marvels at them a little. They’re smooth and a little slippery, soft when he presses. She starts dictating the instructions. Dirk follows like a good student should.

* * *

“You’ve been drinking. It’s only _two_ in the goddamn afternoon.”

Roxy smiles up at him and then she giggles behind a manicured hand. There’s a textbook open on the wooden table in front of them and no alcohol in sight, but now that Roxy doesn’t live with him he can’t monitor every second of her day.

“Are we really gonna go through this for the zillionth time, or are you gonna help me out?”

“Rox, we have to talk about this.”

“Dirk. Not _now_. Please, I’m in the middle of something important, and you have to know. It’s… it’s important to me. So let’s just,” she says, miming picking something up and putting it by the ashtray, “put that talk aside for now and talk about what I came here to tell you.”

“Fine,” he says. What can he say to that? “I’m listening.”

She gestures at the black rocks in front of them. A gradient of light covers every little crevice.

“This thing, it’s made up of billions of tiny little things, like everything else in the universe.”

“Not following you here, Rox.”

Roxy rolls her eyes.

“You can read my book later on. Anyway, these tiny parts are called atoms. This stuff’s made of a type of atom called carbon. See,” she says, taking a pencil and drawing a bunch of hexagons on the table, slanted just so, connecting them with straight lines, placing a black circle at every junction, “they’re arranged like this. The little dots are the atoms, by the way. But if you can rearrange them into another kind of arrangement, you get diamonds.”

“Basically transfiguration, right?”

“Yeah, but, when you’re turning a thimble into a marble, do you ever think about what’s actually going on there? No, not just, yanno, _oh, damn, that’s just some intense magiks going on,_ as in, what’s actually changing? What’s moving? We wizards and witches, we’re too used to just thinking of stuff in terms of _magic did it_. Um, how do I say it… if a wizard lights a candle, he knows he’s gotta strike the match and put it to the fuse, then he’ll have some fire and a lot of melted wax. A Muggle scientist knows exactly what happens every step of the way. What changes around the match when you strike it; why the fuse will light up; what will happen next and how.”

“In order to manipulate the world, a Muggle has to really fucking _get_ it on a basic level? Okay, but we can just skip to actually manipulating. I don’t get your point.”

“But a wizard who knows how to light the candle with the match will do the same thing over and over and just get the same result. A Muggle scientist can think of a shitload of different ways, and different ways to change basically like the _nature_ of the fire made, and stuff like that, using understanding. That’s _without_ magic.”

“Oh,” he says slowly. He understands, now. Even the greatest makers of spells tend to focus on the nature of the magic itself when making their spells, while they rarely bother studying the nature of the items being manipulated with such detail, down to the tiniest piece, to the most indivisible of components; twice the knowledge, twice the power. “Fuck, Rox, that’s… that’s incredible.”

“So’s the Muggle world. Wireless communication. Spaceships. Merlin, even the ability to manipulate _electricity_ , a basic property Muggles don’t even understand completely… not through magic. Not through any power of their own except for what they can sense with their bodies and think of with their heads _._ ”

“They can only control so much, though, even with all that knowledge. But that’s not the same for wizards,” Dirk continues.

Roxy grins.

“Outstanding, Dirky. Or, in Muggle-speak, A plus. Think about what a wizard who studies stuff the way a Muggle might can _do_.”

“ _Shit_. Imagine that.”

“Yeah,” she says wistfully. “It could’ve been me.”

“Rox, I—“

Roxy shakes her head.

“We should just focus on this first,” she says, gesturing at the carbon things. She flips to another page in the book, where a structure similar to the one she drew is depicted next to a diagram of a different kind of structure. “Try focusing enough so you can transfigure it. Not the way a wizard would, but the way a Muggle scientist with magic would.”

He sees her drawing in his mind’s eye, and pours pure transformative magic into one lump with his wand, channeling power like Rose taught him to, once; the lump glows as he imagines lines breaking, dots moving, reconfiguration; Roxy’s eyes widen; diamonds, he thinks, he will have diamonds—

The lump of carbon falls down with a clattering sound. A tiny corner has a pearly sheen to it, and is no longer as opaque as it once was.

“You did it,” Roxy gasps. “Dirky, you _diiid_ it.”

“We did it. It was us. It was mostly you, Rox,” he says, placing the wand on the table. She takes his hands and squeezes them, smiling beatifically, and Dirk almost forgets about his earlier frustration. Then he thinks of Roxy, ruined by drink. Thinks of the brilliance she could no longer show. “But you have to sober up.”

“Dirk,” she whines.

“Dirk nothing. I’m fucking serious. I’m going to your house and casting a spell that won’t let alcohol enter. Not a single drop. If I had a few glasses of scotch just before I come visit you, then tough luck. I’ll have to talk to you from outside.”

“Hand sanitizers,” she argues.

“Buy some goddamn hand soap; what do we have convenience stores for?”

She looks at her book and sighs. Dirk clenches his fist, getting up, considering giving voice to his thoughts; but he won’t, because Dirk is good at being cruel, and he will spare his sister his words. It’s the least he can do right now.

“I’m not kidding, Rox, I’m going to do it,” he promises her. He glances at his watch. “I have to meet Arteme Leijon at the Ministry.”

“Okay,” she says quietly.

 _I fucked up_ , he thinks, thinking of every moment that he could’ve done something to keep her close, to stop her from moving, to take her to a therapist; what would Rose do? What would Dave do? He thinks of an alternate universe where they survived the battle. As for Dirk, he could brew potions that bred obsession; he could make water appear in a desert; but what use was magic if it could not keep Roxy’s from leaving her, if it couldn’t prevent her from reaching for glass after glass? What fucking use?

Even as Arteme Leijon keeps talking about the impact of magic on Muggle life, Dirk marvels at how you can see the same thing so differently, when you factor in scale. Leijon talks about history and socio-economic factors, because in the end those are the things that human relationships and transactions amount to; but if you zoom in you can find Dirk and Roxy, lost in a sea of change, his hand hovering over the merchandise at Borgin and Burkes, her head bowed over a still, colorful textbook. Graphite versus diamond.

“We’ve been talking to the Muggle Minister,” says Leijon, when Dirk asks her about it, very casually, over dinner. “He doesn’t believe in keeping his people in the dark, either.”

She’s come a long way from the vengeful wreck she was during the War. During the last two years she’s spent all her time collecting Synlas Vantas’s works and compiling them, releasing them to the public in one loud stream of pro-Muggle literature. Then she had come to Jade English, Minister of Magic, who knew something she had to do when she saw it. If they let Muggles suffer because of magical conflicts, and let Muggle problems that magic could solve continue, she wouldn’t be able to sleep at night, she’d explained.

Jade English, together with Kanaya and Nitram, made their way across the globe and managed to get the international community to agree quite swiftly. In fact, English had said, laughing, the Americans were just about to do it themselves!

“This shouldn’t be surprising; it _is_ an untenable moral position. We can solve so many of the world’s problems, yet we refuse to. It is a little like withholding the vaccine to a lethal plague because ‘then _everyone_ would want it’. The only reason why secrecy is still the status quo is that it would cause a lot of chaos of Muggles were to learn about us,” Leijon says. “Synlas always said so.”

On her side of the table there are two texts. The first is a hefty volume written by the great Muggle rights activist Synlas Vantas; the second, much thinner and more care-worn, is one of Karkat’s journals. Dirk knows exactly what it holds, and though it would’ve made Karkat swell up with pride to know what they are doing with his plans—they should’ve been his to execute, Dirk thinks bitterly. They will remember his proposal and his ideas. He will become another name in a textbook.

The people whose lives Karkat’s dreams are about to change will never know him, or the way his heart beats for the world even if he would rather die than admit it, or hear him snarl when someone says something stupid in front of him, or know the fact that he can reach out his kind, calloused hands to a complete jerk and not regret it one bit, despite everything he says. They will revere him. They will never love him.

Dirk cuts his steak with a little more force than necessary.

* * *

This time he holds the graphite in his hand. A blaze of interconnected hexagons, white burning lines, spheres vibrating with impatient energy as Dirk lets the magic seep from his tissues, through his skin, as it meets the atom and wreaks energetic havoc; and then, control, as he places the atoms in their numbered places, and in his mind’s eye, draws new lines, new bonds; diamonds, that twinkle in Roxy’s eyes when the radio plays a song she likes; the light glinting on Jane’s glasses as she adjusts them; Jake shaking off droplets of water, glittering white-pink-blue in noon sunlight, as he leaves a river behind.

The lump is cold, and milky-white, coated with a new kind of shine. He sets it on the ground. Then he takes out his wand, tapping the rock twice; it glows blue as pieces fall away.

He settles on a navette cut. The angles reflect dying light and he places the diamond on Roxy’s open palm. Her fingers close over it.

* * *

“Merlin, I’m starving,” Roxy says as they step out into the biting cold. Without even thinking about it, Dirk fires up a warming spell, cloaking them in heat. She laughs.

“After Jade gets things in order,” she says, “I’m going to write so many papers. So _many_ papers. I mean, where is this heat energy coming from? What kind of potential energy are you changing into it? It’s like, maybe magic’s just a matter of catalyzing a bunch of reactions that aren’t impossible, just kind of _improbable_ under ordinary conditions. Or maybe there’s a diff set of laws that govern magic—laws that don’t seem to have any noticeable effect unless a really specific kind and magnitude of force is exerted on a particular system. Or—there’s a special magic particle that we’ve never really paid attention to before, or _couldn’t_ , because Muggle scientists are unable to perceive it.”

“Right,” says Dirk; he can still keep up _now_ , but Roxy is still high on the success of her thesis and she’s going to go on even more obscure tangents as time goes on.

“But isn’t that exciting—the thought of a particle that can’t be detected through the means we’ve used to detect other particles? A particle that doesn’t respond to any kind of charge or physical quantity Muggle scientists know of or can manipulate? Merlin!” She laughs again. “Everyone will be so _confused!_ Think of the Muggle physicists! It’ll be the electron’s position and the behavior of shit on a quantum level all over again! There are going to be _so many fights_. It’s just mad, innit?”

“Downright so,” he says. “It feels right somehow, Rox, that you’d lead the way when Muggles and wizards stand up and watch what they knew about the world crumble.”

“You make it sound so scary. It is zero percent scary, my man, my dude Dirkson. Any real scientist should remember the words of Dana Scully: ‘Nothing happens in contradiction to nature, only in contradiction to what we know of it.’” Her eyes shine. “And what we know of it is going to undergo a hundred-eighty degree flip—no, no, not right. We’re going to move into a new age of enlightenment. I mean, imagine the innovations science and magic can come up with together.”

He grins.

“I take it you’re watching the live broadcast of the English Conference tonight?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” she shoots back. “Jane and Jake are coming over too; we’re going to have a little party, celebrating my shiny new degree and Jane’s promotion.”

 _Won’t you come_ is implicit. Dirk is silent for a while, leading them both to a seafood restaurant nearby he knows Roxy likes.

“It’s a no-booze occasion,” Roxy adds, probably noticing his lack of response. This is enough to make Dirk smile involuntarily, warmth that has nothing to do with the spell blooming in his chest. He holds her hand a little tighter, wondering whether the strength his sister’s slight frame can contain, the undying hope she keeps alive, can be felt through human touch.

“I’ll drop by tomorrow,” he promises. “I’ve got a super important meeting tonight, yeah? Top secret-level shit—“ he mimes looking around frantically, “—hell, I’m not even supposed to tell you I’ve got anything planned. They’d cut out my tongue, Rox. They’d drag me through town at night when no one could see, chained to a flaming motorcycle. They’d bury me in Greenland.”

Roxy rolls her eyes. “Merlin, Dirk. If it’s a hot date, I really don’t care; you’ll introduce me sooner or later.”

“Aw man, caught red-handed trying to get some action again,” he groans. “Seriously, though, it’s a pretty important meeting. You know how it’s really important to you how scientists respond to Jade? I’m trying to monitor the old guard—what remains of Rose’s family, people like that. Leijon thinks I’m the man for it.”

“It’s a dangerous crowd, Dirk,” Roxy says as they reach the restaurant. This coming from the girl who’d run screaming spell after spell at the Death Eaters who had tried to kill him, once; from the girl who’d made herself present amongst the most violent of men and women at places where a too-loud breath would’ve given her away.

“Someone’s gotta do the job. You can’t say it’s not important—most of them are fading in power but they’ve got connections that go way back, Rox, and those bonds aren’t weak shit. And some families… the Maryams, the Serkets—hell, even Meenah Peixes—they’re still forces that shape the magical community. It’s unwise to ignore how they’d respond to such a huge change.”

“You know, that’s what Dave always said about Rose. ‘Someone’s gotta do the job’.”

“Yeah,” he says, feeling a bit annoyed despite himself. He gives the hostess his reservation details and she leads him in; Roxy closes her eyes and visibly breathes in the scent of seafood.

“I know you’re just looking out for me. It’s our job to look out for each other, but this time you don’t need to. They’re harmless, Rox—I mean, they could do some nasty things, politics-wise, but are they threats to my well-being? Shit, absolutely fucking not. Relax. I’m not facing Death Eaters, just a bunch of purebloods who are about to get their minds blown all the way to Valhalla.”

“Right,” she says, back to cheerful again. “And blown those minds will be.”

When Dirk arrives at the glossy apartment Meenah Peixes keeps in Muggle London, he’s not the Dirk that walked with Roxy earlier. His hair’s combed back, his suit’s pressed, and a pair of dark glasses belonging to Dave’s father hides his eyes from the world. It’s an angular and conspicuously plastic addition to his outfit, jarring against the ancient, timeless lines of his appearance. Let them be a shock. Let him be the symbol of Roxy’s new age in the more shadowy part of the world.

He takes his seat in an armchair Meenah’s mother might have sat in, once. The others are all sitting in a loose semicircle, regarding him. Even after the war, there is a certain air about purebloods—the awareness of the power they hold in their hands, gifted to them by the hands of history. It is not the kind of power that fades so easily.

“And… here comes the man of the hour,” Meenah crows.

“Call me Timaeus Lalonde,” he says. He thinks of the family tree Rose had found in the Lalonde manor, spread out on the floor of their house. Even a birth with complications surrounding it is a birth recorded. Then again, right after his and Roxy’s birth, it seemed, the grand tapestry had been moved from the manor’s receiving room to the inner sanctum within its heart, where Rose would have lived if she had not rejected that part of her life. “It’s my birth name. My real one.”

“A Lalonde,” Vriska Serket notes. Dirk had half-lied to Roxy; of the two ancient families he’d mentioned, only the Serkets have a representative tonight. The Maryams have no dealings in meetings like this. “Interesting.”

“Sure, sure,” says Meenah. “I remember what you were called back then, kid.”

“Right, and I’ve got a bottle of Firewhisky and fuck-knows-what that we’re gonna feed the Third Years.”

She chuckles at that. Meenah had been at Karkat’s funeral too, weeks after the war ended. Dirk wondered if she’d grieved for him for long. She’d disappeared back to Egypt right after the whole sordid affair.

The Makara representative gestures at the television, raising an eyebrow.

“Aw, what the hell,” Meenah drawls as she thumbs a button on the remote. “Let’s watch it.”

The Conference itself—not much of a conference as it is an announcement, really—is brief, succinct, and clinical. Arteme Leijon and a few other representatives from different magical governments trot out an admirably comprehensive presentation on the recent history of the magical community. Afterwards, Nitram goes over the International Statute of Secrecy and makes it clear that the two Ministries have already collaborated to make changes to support the coming change, drawing attention to a few newly-drafted laws that, at the time, must have caused some confusion among Muggles. The Muggle Prime Minister talks about how the Conference came about and why they chose to repeal the Statute. Dirk figures Arteme wrote the speech.

Then, Jade English herself steps up on the podium.

“Good evening, everyone. My name is Jade English. I am the current Minister of Magic of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Many of you have never seen me before. Some of you may already be familiar with who I am. Right now that does not matter. The message I wish to convey today will not distinguish between those who have never heard of me and those who may have. It is one that the world needs to hear.

All of us present are aware that the revelation of magic is one that will spark fear and anger in many parts of the world. We do not take lightly the impact this knowledge will have on anyone, magical or otherwise. Those who do not have magic may start to fear those who do; those who have magic and have lived under the protection of secrecy for so long may find the terror of persecution suddenly grow fierce and monstrous in their hearts.”

She pauses. The whole room falls into a hush.

“This fear will cause the near future to be difficult indeed for all of us, and the world will become as tumultuous as it could be in peacetime. But we must all remember that the human race’s greatest strength is the ability to adapt to change. It is the thing that has carried us so far for so long, and it is a strength that every human being possesses, regardless of magical ability.

We must all have faith that we will all pull through this great shift in awareness—that we will come to regard one another not with suspicion, but with appreciation and camaraderie. In terms of character and spirit, the existence of magic is irrelevant. What I mean is when we all strive for peace, harmony, and progress, we do so as human beings, not as wizards or non-wizards. We all have the same goals. I, and the leaders you see now before you, have realized that we can reach these goals if we all work together and use the resources previously unavailable and incomprehensible to us. We should not let magic come between us. It should be a force that binds us together. Like gravity and electricity, magic is another part of nature that mankind can learn to embrace.

I envision a world where there is no distinction drawn between magical and non-magical communities. I envision a world where we are all people who will unite and put our varied skills and proficiencies to use so that we may move towards a brighter future hand-in-hand. I invite you to share this vision with me, and together we will make it a reality.”

The audio dissolves into a blizzard of applause; cameras flash and Dirk can hear faint questioning shouts from the press, but they are only barely audible under the sound of clapping. Dirk has forgotten just how different Minister of Magic Jade English is from regular old Nanna English—the twinkle in her eyes becomes a gleam of dignified hope, and solemnity masks the playfulness that usually colors her words.

“Well,” Serket exclaims after the commercial break starts and Meenah turns off the television. Dirk’s never seen her before; apparently, the rumors that the American half of the Serket family is much stronger these days are true. “Don’t that beat all.”

A part of him wants to shudder at the prospect of the Serkets pushing potions into the drug trade. A part of him wants to shake Vriska Serket’s hand and show her how to do it.

“Now it’s out, and the clock is ticking,” he says, addressing everyone in the room. “I’m aware of what Meenah wants here, and I have a vague idea of the Serkets’ angle, but the rest of you haven’t given me as much as a proposal.”

Eridan Ampora snorts before piping up. His family has its own accent, all wobbly, watery w’s, which is actually kind of funny. He can hear Roxy snorting in his head.

“We want to know how you’re going to go about it all. If I don’t like what I hear, I’m free to walk out now and find my own way to do things.”

“Yeah. But you heard English just now. The world’s going to change. After the war you all felt how it changed for purebloods especially—a lot of slipping and closed channels—but it doesn’t have to be that way now. You understand how the magical economy works; most of you have been born to manipulate it and keep your power intact. I’m here to help you do just that. I keep in touch with English and Leijon, so I’ve got that area covered.”

“We know all about your involvement in the war,” Ampora says disdainfully.

“Eridan? Shut up,” Serket hisses.

“Plus, my previous association with Karkat Vantas and other Muggleborns from different parts of Muggle society—and Roxy, because you’d all be lying if you said you don’t know what happened to her—made me connections in the Muggle world which you will all find pretty fucking impressive if you manage to find out who’s who.” Which is a bit of a lie. Dirk did that by taking what he knew from Leijon and Jade to some powerful Muggles as a kind of investment, and now it’s about to pay off. “Meenah. Why don’t you tell them what I’ve done for you so far?”

She grins. Dirk sits back and waits for her to make the pitch for him.

“Sure thing. Listen, little Ampora. Muggles don’t have wands, so when they attack each other, they have to use weaponry. They build things to hurt each other, and they’re pretty good at it. You gotta see that shit to believe it—I’ve been up to my gills in books about Muggle weapons history, and they don’t fuck around. They’re _great_ at selling it, and Muggles are eager as shell to buy that stuff. The Peixes legacy’s gonna live on in that—Muggle weaponry? Plus magic? I’ll be rolling in galleons—or pounds, take your pick—by the time my shit’s sorted out. Timaeus here, he knows this guy… an ‘arms dealer’, Muggles call him…”

* * *

It’s way past dark when the firewood has been gathered into what could be called a pile, vaguely conical in shape, tottering slightly under its own weight. The sticks are ugly and misshapen. He thinks they should be neater; Roxy laughs loudly and tells him they’re only going to amount to ashes anyway.

Dirk had felt the wood break as his axe hit the trees they’d come from. Again and again he had swung, feeling his arm shake every time he hit the mark. It was as though the bark had splintered under the force of his own hand; he’d felt it pushing back as he cut it.

Newton’s Third Law, Roxy had said, but Dirk knows that by now.

Not a law my actions usually have to obey, he had replied.

He is grateful for this: the way Roxy makes him carry the firewood with his own hands, like she does; the way she makes him use a torch or a flashlight, which has batteries he must change; how they have to walk from point A to point B. It feels like the earth is more real beneath his feet. His nervous system lights up with activity as, suddenly, they must respond to a series of stimuli that almost never touch him at all. Neurons flare at the unfamiliar sensation of rough wood on his skin. Even in the summers of their youth he’d never had to interact with anything on this level. All he’d have to do was wave his wand and the fire would come together—he could make it green if he wanted it that way, or pink.

This one lies unlit before them. The air grows colder by the minute. Heat escapes his body and he shivers inside his jacket, glancing at Roxy, who seems mostly unbothered. “Why,” she says, smiling, “what’s the matter, Dirky? Need a drink to warm you up?”

“No,” he says, “let’s not.”

“Was talking about a nice hot mug of chocolate.”

She walks over to her yellow sedan, opens the door, and bends herself to get half inside it. He hears the sound of her rummaging for something for a few seconds before she emerges with something in her hand and walks back to him.

“Do the honors?” she asks.

Roxy keeps a box of matches in the glove compartment of her car, an old and flattened rectangle with the print of a faraway beach on the cover. Now she holds it out him with fingers stiff from the cold. Carefully, he takes it, and asks why she has one anyway. He looks at her again, sees no telltale signs of a smoking habit. Still, he resolves to do a more thorough check later on.

She says that you never knew when you’d need a fire. Then she adds that it’s not like _she_ can conjure one out of thin air, like Dirk can. Then she laughs. The sound is delighted and true, without a trace of bitterness. Among many other things, that is why Dirk loves her.

* * *

At thirty-two years old, Roxy Strider is now the youngest woman to ever win a Nobel Prize in a scientific field. In her speech, she thanks her grad students, who “stuck with me even when I was nearly incoherent, my brain just stuffed with all sorts of half-formed ideas”; she thanks her parents “from whom I’ve inherited the drive to persevere in the face of all challenges”; and she thanks “my brother… for staying up with me during the longest nights of my life… for being there, no matter what.”

The last time Dirk cried, he had been twelve, and he had come home to Rose bleeding on the floor one summer afternoon.

He does not cry when Roxy receives the award; nor when she gives her lecture on the nature of electromagnetic interference caused by magic and how she and her team found ways to circumvent it. He does not cry when Roxy’s colleagues pat him on the back.

When they get into their cab, making their way through Oslo, Dirk’s vision blurs with wet warmth, and he does not fight it.

“Rox,” he says, as she hugs him the way she always used to, back when they were children and Roxy’s dream had been to become a cursebreaker.

“I know, I know; look at me, changing the world and all that shite,” she says, but she chokes on that too.

They stop by at a McDonald’s, where no one recognizes Roxy and Dirk can buy himself two large burgers without fearing judgment. He knows his face is red and puffed-up from all the shed tears but he doesn’t care. He knows the reason for that. He keeps it close and warm, where no memory spell could wipe it out.

“So, I think I should be congratulating you too,” Roxy says when they’ve sat down, shoulder-to-shoulder in a firetruck-red booth. The sofa is stiff and unyielding. Dirk feels like he should be a little offended.

“For what? Having you for a sister?”

“No, silly,” she says. “The recent Serket Felix Felicis branch acquisition. Must be nice to finally have appearances sorted out.”

Dirk takes a slow bite of his Big Mac, watches Roxy’s gaze turn thoughtful under the washed-out lights. He thinks of the way she fires a cathode ray in a vacuum tube. Thinks of the way she reads an oscilloscope. She’d made up silly spells with him as her subject, and they still laughed at the same dumb jokes, but Dirk should not forget. His sister analyzes for a living.

(As does he.)

“You’ve been talking to Terezi.”

“She’s my friend. Talking to her, putting two and two together, those are things I can do, my bro.”

“I don’t doubt that, Rox.”

The recent almost-robbery of Terezi Pyrope’s Gringotts vault; Vriska Serket’s sudden compulsion to sell her shares; Aranea Serket quitting the family business; the escape of fugitive Damara Megido; and Sollux Captor’s entrance to the scientific community, although that last bit must have escaped Roxy’s notice if she’s still so willing to work with him. To a layperson the connection between such events must seem elusive, but Roxy is no layperson. She is an expert in physics and chemistry, and knows quite a bit about biology, but that is not relevant here. What’s relevant is her expertise on the subject of Dirk Strider.

He’s long accepted that she would see right through him.

“Terezi told me a lot of things. She’s also said that she has diddly-squat on you; no evidence, no proof, not even a stray tip. Which means, as a scientist, I should ignore whatever she’s been saying. But as your sister… that’s a whole other can of bananas.”

“You’re worried that she’ll sniff something out sooner or later?”

Roxy smiles sadly.

“No. She’s got the law holding her back. You’re as unfettered as a bug in a no-bird zone. But I remember the day I got my Master’s, Dirk, the day of the Conference. I had a feeling. A really un-scientist-y hunch. It feels nasty, having it proven right.”

 _I’m sorry,_ he wants to say, but that seems wrong, somehow. Inadequate.

“I’ll be careful.”

“I know you will. But I guess I’ve just seen too many careful preparations wrecked to feel better because of that—I mean, I work in a research center, Dirk, experiments planned to the dot fail every day. And people… they’re batshit. It’s way harder to predict their behavior than that of electrons.” Then she shakes her head. “And I also know there’s no use gabbing on and on at you about it. I mean, if mass were a property of people’s personalities, yours would have a mass of quintillion tonnes. But I have to _try_.”

It’s not like he can tell her this is the only thing he knows how to do. It’s not like Dirk can say: you’ve made your place in the new world, and I know mine.

He thinks of Dave, making a deal with Spinneret Serket when he assumes Dirk is already asleep; of Rose washing redness from her hands, saying with infinite sadness: “If only the world could be bloodless, Dirk.” Then she’d smiled. “But then, what would I do with myself, hm?”

But he doesn’t tell Roxy this, because he knows she remembers them at their best: wands blazing, furious light in their eyes. Instead, he takes her hands.

“Hey. No bleak shit tonight. We’re celebrating you shaking up the goddamn world like a cosmic typhoon. That’s you, Rox. It’s goddamn science monsoon season up in here, I’m up to my _knees_ in all the fucking physics.” He lunges sideways and shakes her until she’s collapsing in giggles. “Watch out, it’s Hurricane Roxy, coming to fuck _you_ up.”

She grins under the fluorescent lights, the creases and her laughter lines deep in shadow. It’s that easy; the world falls away.

* * *

Yawning, she tells him she’s going to go to sleep. Then she closes her eyes. In a few minutes her breathing has turned even and deep, just like when they were children and Dave thought that Dirk couldn’t see him when he peeked at them while they slept.

One thing Roxy has inherited from Dave is this. Dirk remembers coming downstairs to find Rose pouring a mysterious substance (gin, he would later learn) into a steaming mug of Earl Grey, turning to smile at him with sleepless eyes. Dave had been curled up on the floor next to her feet, snoring happily in his shades. Rose had given Dirk a _look_ and nudged Dave gently with one leg; he had stirred, but he hadn’t woken up.

How the agents, informants, dealers and lords would laugh; Timaeus, lying next to his sister, down on thin plastic, breathing contently like he deserves it. In his mind’s eye he comes home and disbands every network, dismisses every man and woman under his command. He’d have weekends spent in Roxy’s apartment, regular outings with Jake and Jane; he’d sleep well every night. He wonders what keeps him from doing so. Never seeing his friends, hardly ever seeing his sister, fearing for their lives—is this the life he wants? No, he tells himself, but he remembers the feel of overseeing a man being brought to his knees, the ice that can run through the tiniest of blood vessels; knowing where money and magic flow, and intersect, and blend; seeing the world shaped by his hands, as Roxy had done in her own brighter way.

The anger he’d kept and nurtured when he was just a child, a deep blackness that mixed in with his admiration and still-water love for Rose, comes to mind—perhaps that’s how Roxy feels about him now. The pain of the thought feels like a lungful of fire. He hadn’t understood, back then, any of what Rose did—her disappearances, the tangled web of secrets and allegiances, the way she always seemed to want to keep him and Roxy at arm’s length. Then little by little the curtains were pulled open.

He steps back and thinks of it like this: the way his friends might see him now is like that, but in reverse. They watch the Dirk they know recede. He is in motion, falling backwards; and his mass is a quintillion tonnes, his inertia directly proportional to that.

The bottle of Felix Felicis gleams in his hand, even though there is no light source. Dirk closes his fingers over it. Tomorrow the sun will rise; he’ll have a tablespoon of liquid luck and a perfect day with sister. What comes after can wait.

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to be part of a much larger series which would have one fail!heist fic that focuses more on the trolls (Sollux, Terezi, Vriska, Aranea, Damara) and its ending would've been another huge turning point for Dirk and Roxy, summarized a little bit in the segment of this story where Roxy confronts Dirk after receiving her Nobel Prize. I also had a war-era Hogwarts fic planned, centered around Meenah and Karkat (and by extension Aranea, Terezi, Sollux and Dirk). Unfortunately, life got in the way.
> 
> Although--as it is pretty outdated and not at all ship-centric--I don't think this fic will get a lot of hits, it's got a lot of things I really like in it (Strilonde feels, not-so-straightforward family relationships, some actual science + pseudoscientific babbling, the beginning of a new era through the eyes of its major players) so I'm glad it's up, and thank you so much for reading.


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